... spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. "Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is Page 65 fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the pure poetic intelligence, making it perhaps less clear by limitations but more vivid, colourful... a Truth beyond it. The poetic intelligence is not at all part of that clarified spiritual seeing and thinking—it is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane,—this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic... ecstasy am I, Where time rolls inward to eternal shores.) SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT 1 "Second line Intuitive with Overmind touch. Third line imaginative Poetic Intelligence. 2 "Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind. 3 "Intuitive with Overmind ouch. 4 "Intuitive. 5 "Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch. 6 "Mixture of Higher and Illumined ...
... (Does "poetic eloquence" belong only to the mental plane which you have called "the poetic intelligence" and more generally "the creative intelligence"? Can it be part also of "the Higher Mind" or "the Higher Thought" which is an "overhead" plane?) "It belongs to the poetic intelligence, but as in most of Milton it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and language... echoes there, no deep chambers; the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence,—for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works." "Naturally, something from the higher planes can come into the poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. That happens in such lines as [Milton's] Those thoughts that wander through Eternity." "The... the psychic, it is usually spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and compelling parts of the nature. When on the contrary the source of inspiration is in the creative poetic intelligence or even the higher mind or the illumined mind, the poetry which comes from this is quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect ...
... the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. "Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the pure poetic intelligence, making it perhaps less clear by limitations but more vivid, colourful, vivid... Truth beyond it. The poetic intelligence is not at all part of that clarified spiritual seeing and thinking — it is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane,—this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger p... high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works." Page 1 "I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual consciousness where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere ...
... darkness in terrestrial things That will not suffer long too glad a note. [ pp. 16-17 ] Are these lines the poetic intelligence at its deepest, say, like a mixture of Sophocles and Virgil? They may be the pure or the intuitivised higher mind. I do not think it is the poetic intelligence any more than Virgil's Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt , which I think to be the Higher Mind... that can be done by breaking rules, well, so much the worse for the rule. 30 October 1936 The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first book is new or else the old so altered as to be no more what... believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them. 3 November 1936 It will take you exactly eight minutes to read the third section and two more minutes are enough for you to decide in the matter of alternatives ...
... TALK FORTY-TWO We have now to comment critically on the poetry of the thought-mind and on the poetry of the planes beyond it. We have already had a taste of the Miltonic version of "the poetic intelligence" as well as obtained a glimpse of Dryden's exercise of the same poetic agency in dealing with Chaucer's lines on life. While Milton, compared with Shakespeare in two of his splendid bursts of... came a bit of a cropper, rhetorically artificialising what was spontaneous and moving in the Mediaeval singer. It may be tempting to aver that Dryden failed because he wrote in an age when the Poetic Intelligence acted from its surface part — the part which put into verse-form the reasoning faculty skilfully expressing itself in measured language. Indeed this faculty exposes itself to the danger of an... religion's superiority by a subtly powerful dialectic of rhythm, structure and style. They demonstrate it to our grey cells by proving it on our senses and pulses. When we pass beyond the Poetic Intelligence we enter either the Inner Mind and the Psychic Consciousness or rise into the "overhead" hierarchy. It will be enlightening no less than interesting to take one particular word and see how poets ...
... substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the pure poetic intelligence, making it perhaps less clear by limitation but more vivid, colourful, vivid with... a Truth beyond it. The poetic intelligence is not at all part of that clarified spiritual seeing and thinking—it is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane,—this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic... The Sources of Poetry Letters on Poetry and Art Overhead Poetry Higher Mind and Poetic Intelligence I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual [consciousness] where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mind level although ...
... high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, - for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he creates." Then Sri Aurobindo, referring to Vedic imagery, adds: "he does not stray into 'the mystic cavern of the heart', does not follow the inner fire entering like a thief with the... brings with it all that violence, disturbed rhythm, counter-pointed expression which are extremely effective on occasion but often strike us as no more than a clever torture of the language. The poetic intelligence has not found its proper voice in him. Although his mental ingenuities come alive frequently enough, the genuine orientation of the mind towards intellectual thought is baulked of consummation... Higher Mind. Sri Aurobindo says: "When Milton starts his poem - Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden Tree - he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the substance or the style. But there is a largeness of rhythm and sweep of the language which has a certain kinship to the ...
... intellectual and imaginative. and of I come, O Sea, To measure my enormous self with thee. No; the poem "To the Sea" was produced by a collaboration of the dynamic poetic intelligence with the higher vital urge. April 1932 I shall be obliged if you will indicate the origin of the few examples below—only the first of which is from my own work. Plumbless inaudible... which are at best but dull and hoary, Mere glimmering and decays. I thought they were from the illumined mind. It is a mixture. Something of the illumined mind, something of the poetic intelligence diluting it and preventing the full sovereignty of the higher expression. 17 March 1935 Page 51 What about these lines of Vaughan's—are they from the illumined mind? 1)... What visionary urge Has stolen from horizons watched alone Into thy being with ethereal guile? [ Second line ] Intuitive with overmind touch. [ Third line ] Imaginative poetic intelligence. A huge sky-passion sprouting from the earth In branchèd vastnesses of leafy rapture. Ditto with something of the higher Mind. The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind. Intuitive ...
... AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "Very fine—language and rhythm remarkably harmonious, terres totusque rotundus 1 —the expression very felicitous and embodying exactly the thing seen. Source is poetic intelligence drawn back into inner mind and lifting towards the overhead planes from which it receives its vision and substance and a certain breath of subtlety and largeness." * INVOCATION... upon one's poetic excellence, even us a singer of the Spirit. As regards Harin, you said long ago that he wrote from several planes. And surely his Dark Well poems come from a source beyond the poetic intelligence?) "I used the word 'mystic' in the sense of a certain kind of inner seeing and feeling of things, a way which to the intellect would seem occult and visionary—for this is something... seeing things. So too one may write poetry from different planes or Page 92 sources of inspiration and expressing spiritual feelings, knowledge, experience and yet use the poetic intelligence as the thought medium which gives them shape in speech; such poems are not of the mystic type. One may be mystic in this sense without being spiritual—one may also be spiritual without being ...
... have been writing recently is by no means from the ordinary mind or vital; its inspiration comes from a higher or deeper occult or inner source. 17 May 1937 Poetic Intelligence and Dynamic Sight On the plane of poetic intelligence the creation is by thought, the Idea force is the inspiring Muse and the images are constructed by the idea, they are mind-image; on the plane of dynamic vision one... habitual use of the dynamic vision, but the success is not always commensurate with the energy of the endeavour. 9 July 1931 Poetic Eloquence It [ poetic eloquence ] belongs usually to the poetic intelligence, but, as in much of Milton, it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and largeness. 29 November 1936 Page 19 ...
... shall grief of mine the season wrong, I hear the echoes through the mountains throng, The winds come to me from the fields of sleep. There the inspiration takes up the effort of the poetic intelligence and imagination into a stirred concentration of the speech of sight and in its last movement seems to leap even beyond itself and beyond any pursuit or touch of the intellect into a pure revelatory... according to the kind of object vision and subjective vision which is peculiar to the mind of the poet in its normal action. The citations I have made have been all taken from writers in whom the poetic intelligence and its type of imagination have been the leading forces. The same power in poets who speak more with the direct voice of the life-soul assumes quite another hue and seems even of a very different... It would be difficult for the present human mind to recover the same spirit as moved Shakespeare's speech; it is nearer to that of the later poets and their voice of the brooding or the moved poetic intelligence or of the intuitive mind rising out of the intellect and still preserving something of its tones. Still the manner of the coming poetry is likely to recover and hold as its central secret something ...
... is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence." The poetic intelligence "is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it" and "the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer... than ...
... Classicism and it looks forward to the nineteenth-century Romantic mind's composite manner. But the poetic intelligence, unlike in most of the Metaphysicals who came before Milton, is already master of the Life-force, though not aloof from that power's characteristic play. Only, this poetic intelligence is still of the old type and not of the modem variety. All the more is its alignment with the Graeco-Roman... finds tongue through a half-intuitivised intellect excitedly pressing idea and image into a complex pattern and appealing to a poetic stir in our grey cells. Not that to write from the poetic intelligence as the basic plane is to be unemotional. A Romantic like Shelley appears often one long stream of emotion, and all the Romantics of his period insisted on the free flow of feeling. There is emotion... the choice of the subjects of poetic interest and here and there in the treatment, though not yet quite in the grain and the spirit. Especially, there is the beginning of a direct gaze of the poetic intelligence and imagination upon life and Nature and of another and a new power in English speech, the poetry of sentiment as distinguished from the inspired voice of sheer feeling or passion. But all these ...
... hed as the capacity to receive intuitions through the poetic intelligence, just as the lines about the dancing peacock I have emphasised earlier are his climax through the aesthetic sensation. The philosophy of suffering embodied in the two poems quoted above is not the sole expression given by him to his developing poetic intelligence. He does not become insensitive to the waves of beauty... cration for a couple of years to Sri Aurobindo's yoga in the Ashram at Pondicherry. But there are some other peculiarities of his work deserving notice. Here the aesthetic sensation and the poetic intelligence are openly allied, the lines A sudden vision in my eyes Plucks all the radiance from afar being again a phase of the latter in an intuitive crystallisation of considerable... dawn. Page 175 Chattopadhyaya's performance with the sonnet has in a particular context disclosed a quality not represented in the above — a quality which is neither the poetic intelligence nor the aesthetic sensation, but can only be described as creative insight: the rhythm and the language, though not superior as art to what is done elsewhere, are then of a kind eminently desirable ...
... (Does "poetic eloquence" belong only to the mental plane which you have called "the poetic intelligence" and more generally "the creative intelligence"? Can it be part also of "the Higher Mind" or "the Higher Thought" which is an "overhead" plane ?) "It belongs to the poetic intelligence, but as in most of Milton it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and language... echoes there, no deep chambers; the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence,—for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works." "Naturally, something from the higher planes can come into the poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. That happens in such lines as [Milton's] Those thoughts that wander through Eternity." "The ...
... and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, - for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he creates." Then Sri Aurobindo, referring to Vedic imagery, adds: "he does not stray into 'the mystic cavern of the heart', does not follow the inner fire entering like a thief with ... with it all that violence, disturbed rhythm, counter-pointed expression which are extremely effective on occasion but often strike us as no more than a clever torture of the language. The poetic intelligence has not found its proper voice in him. Although his mental ingenuities come alive frequently enough, the genuine orientation of the mind towards intellectual thought is baulked of consummation... the Higher Mind. Sri Aurobindo says: "When Milton starts his poem - Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden Tree - he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the substance or the style. But there is a largeness of rhythm and sweep of the language which has a certain kinship to the ...
... excellence, even as a singer of the Spirit. As regards Harin, you had said long ago that he wrote from several planes [ see page 476 ]. And surely his Dark Well poems come from a source beyond the poetic intelligence? I used the word "mystic" in the sense of a certain kind of inner seeing and feeling of things, a way which to the intellect would seem occult and visionary—for this is something different... this mystic mind and way of seeing things. So too one may write poetry from different planes or sources of inspiration and expressing spiritual feelings, knowledge, experiences and yet use the poetic intelligence as the thought medium which gives them shape in speech; such poems are not of the mystic type. One may be mystic in this sense without being spiritual—one may also be spiritual without being... right, the Dark Well poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind—other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, coloured and beautiful,—but surely not mystic in the sense given above. 15 March 1937 On Bengali Poetry Written in the ...
... poems quoted in the present collection. Page 17 Sri Aurobindo's Comment 1."Second line Intuitive with Overmind touch. Third line imaginative Poetic Intelligence. 2."Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind. 3."Intuitive with Overmind touch. 4."Intuitive. 5."Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch. 6."Mixture of... plane—the vital ?) "The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly coloured by it as in some others it comes from the poetic intelligence. What play or poem is this from? I don't remember it. It sounds almost overmental in origin." (The phrase occurs in Sonnet CVII beginning: Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic ...
... Life Force with Chaucer's of the subtle physical and, en passant, with Dryden's of the poetic intelligence, but not with the last-named at its best, nor with the best the poetic intelligence itself is capable of. A time was when Shakespeare himself was hailed as a mighty thinker, a paragon of the poetic intelligence, because again and again he starts reflecting on things: the quotable passages in his ...
... one's poetic excellence, even as a singer of the Spirit. As regards Harin, you said long ago that he wrote from several planes. And surely his Dark Well poems come from a source beyond the poetic intelligence?) "I used the word 'mystic' in the sense of a certain kind of inner seeing and feeling of things, a way which to the intellect would seem occult and visionary—for this is something different... this mystic mind and way of seeing things. So too one may write poetry from different planes or sources of inspiration and expressing spiritual feelings, knowledge, experience and yet use the poetic intelligence as the thought medium which gives them shape in speech; such poems are not of the mystic type. One may be mystic in this sense without being spiritual—one may also be spiritual without being... right , the Dark Well poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind-other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, coloured and beautiful, —but surely not mystic in the sense given above." "It is when the thing seen is spiritually ...
... the psychic, it is usually spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and compelling parts of the nature. When on the contrary the source of inspiration is in the creative poetic intelligence or even the higher mind or the illumined mind, the poetry which comes from this quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect... something through from the illumined mind, then there is likely to come to birth work that is really fine and great. When there comes with labour or without it something reasonably like what the poetic intelligence wanted to say then there is something fine or adequate, though it may not be great unless there is an intervention from the higher levels. But when the outer brain is at work trying to fashion... faulty or, at the best, 'good on the whole', but not the thing that ought to have come." Touching on the direct personal question, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Your source is the creative (poetic) intelligence and, at your best, the illumined mind." His verdict on the first version of the poem was: "Good on the whole." The second version—the present one— had his approval. He marked off the last ...
... antithesis which is a mystic idea born of the poetic intelligence and moulding emotion and sensation with unrest of ingenuity and curiosity. The famous lines from Hamlet , There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will, bear again a mystic substance intuited, with the usual vitality, from the plane of the poetic intelligence. But Shakespeare opens up in other places... mortal coil side by side with Keats's To thy high requiem become a sod Page 98 to distinguish the rhythm of the élan vital thinking, from that of the poetic intelligence cast into a beautiful turn of phrase but lacking the Shakespearean life-quiver. Or compare O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew ...
... most of the poem is idealistically romantic rather than mystically Platonic. And even in the exceptional places the mysticism is not what I have designated as direct. The language is of the poetic intelligence visited by the rapture and radiance of an occult sphere of mentality behind it: both vision and rhythm are, for all that occult visitation, indirect in their mystical import and impact: they... eloquent; She feels the world beneath her feet Thrill in a passionate intent; Through her our tides of feeling roll And find their God within her soul. It is again the poetic intelligence speaking — with a difference in two respects from Shelley's passages. First, the inner mind has contributed a certain intuitive intimacy of contact with mystical experience rather than a wash ...
... time, so it could not enter into the scheme." 3 In another letter of the same year: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first Book is new, or else the old so altered as to be no more what... sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." 4 The position arrived at in 1946 can be apprehended from a letter written in that year. Sri Aurobindo says: "You will see when you get the full typescript [of ...
... most of the poem is idealistically romantic rather than mystically Platonic. And even in the exceptional places the mysticism is not what I have designated as direct. The language is of the poetic intelligence visited by the rapture and radiance of an occult sphere of mentality behind it: both vision and rhythm are, for all that occult visitation, indirect in their mystical import and impact: they... eloquent; She feels the world beneath her feet Thrill in a passionate intent; Through her our tides of feeling roll And find their God within her soul. It is again the poetic intelligence speaking - with a difference in two respects from Shelley's passages. First, the inner mind has contributed a certain intuitive intimacy of contact with mystical experience rather than a wash ...
... very original and expresses with great force the spiritual experience. A very fine poem—most of it being in substance from the Illumined Mind (except 2 or 3 lines) but its rhythm belongs to the poetic intelligence, strong and clear-cut but not with the subtle or large inner tones of the overhead music. It is a very luminous and powerful image." * GULFS OF NIGHT From hills inaureoled... into a symbol of inner phenomena and into that operation a certain strain of mystic mind enters, but what is prominent is the intuitive inspiration throughout. It blends with the intuitive poetic intelligence in the first stanza, gets touched by the overhead intuition in the second, gets full of it in the third and again rises rapidly to that in the two last lines of the fourth stanza. This is what ...
... think either can be called mystic poets—Milton not at all. A religious fervour or metaphysical background belongs to the mind and vital, not to a mystic consciousness. Dante writes from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive force behind it. 18 October 1936 Marlowe To me he seems an experiment wherein the occult voices were conceiving an epic drama with the central conception bodied... to an Elizabethan or semi-Elizabethan style, but the Elizabethan energy is no longer there—he does not launch himself as Milton did into a new style suitable for the predominant play of the poetic intelligence. Energy and force of a kind he has, but it is twisted, laboured, something that has not found itself. That is why he is not so great a poet as he might have been. He is admired today because ...
... a vividness of imagination and feeling which disregards the mind's positive view of things and its logical sequences; the centre or centres it knocks at are not the brain-mind, not even the poetic intelligence but the subtle physical, the nervous, the vital or the psychic centre. The poem he quotes from Blake is certainly not nonsense, but it has no positive and exact meaning for the intellect or the... ardness and directness of style. Page 95 Now I come to the law prohibiting repetition. This rule aims at a certain kind of intellectual elegance which comes into poetry when the poetic intelligence and the call for a refined and classical taste begin to predominate. It regards poetry as a cultural entertainment and amusement of the highly civilised mind; it interests by a faultless art ...
... the psychic, it is usually spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and compelling parts of the nature. When on the contrary the source of inspiration is in the creative poetic intelligence or even the higher mind or the illumined mind, the poetry which comes from this quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect... something through from the illumined mind, then there is likely to come to birth work that is really fine and great. When there comes with labour or without it something reasonably like what the poetic intelligence wanted to say, then there is Page 6 something fine or adequate, though it may not be great unless there is an intervention from the higher levels. But when the outer brain is at work ...
... that time, so it could not enter into the scheme...." (Letter 1936) II "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening.... Moreover there have been several successive revisions each trying to lift the general level... believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence, or vital towards them.... It is only occasionally that it is pure Higher Mind—a mixture of the Intuitive or Illumined is usually there......" - Letters on "Savitri" — 1936 III ...
... and a subtle inner change of their character. Actually, however, while the previous revolutions in the domain of poetry have moved within the limits of the normal and received action of the poetic intelligence, the upward and inward movement and great widening of which the human mind is now in labour is an effort of such rapidity and magnitude that it appears like an irresistible breaking out of all... and careful technique, and the movement of poetic feeling, sometimes grave, sometimes permitted a lighter and more rapid impulsion, is chastened and subdued to the service of the reflective poetic intelligence. The absolute simplicities and spontaneities of the soul's emotion which were the root of the original lyric impulse get only an occasional opportunity of coming back to the surface, and in their ...
... for a last transcendence. For the first time in occidental literature, we get in this fourth turn of the evolution of English poetry some faint initial falling of this higher light upon the poetic intelligence. Some ancient poets may have received something of it through myth and symbol; a religious mystic here and there may have attempted to give his experience rhythmic and imaginative form. But here... the choice of the subjects of poetic interest and here and there in the treatment, though not yet quite in the grain and the spirit. Especially, there is the beginning of a direct gaze of the poetic intelligence and imagination upon life and Nature and of another and a new power in English speech, the poetry of sentiment as distinguished from the inspired voice of sheer feeling or passion. But all these ...
... substance and impetus without being mixed or altered. The inspiration itself can hail from any one of the following planes: 1)The Subtle Physical. 2)The Vital. 3) The Creative or Poetic Intelligence. 4)The Inner Mind, with its four domains: a)The inner Mind Intelligence. b)The Intuitive Intelligence. c)The Mystic Mind. d)The Mind of Dynamic Vision. 5)The Psychic.... Overmind Proper. d)The Gnostic or Supramentalised Overmind. The Inner Mind Intelligence is the Inner Mind acting not in a special field of its own but in the same field as the Creative or Poetic Intelligence, though with a different power. The Intuitive Intelligence is the Inner Mind receiving from the plane of the Intuition a light not its own and adapting itself to it: the pure intuitive play is ...
... at that time, so it could not enter into the scheme." In another letter of the same year: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first Book is new or else the old so altered as to be no more what... believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." The position arrived at in 1946 can be apprehended from a letter written in that year. Sri Aurobindo says: "You will see when you get the full typescript [of the first ...
... not the sybil who speaks here but the seer." 18 Goethe's Faust, accounted after Dante' s Divina Commedia as the greatest single poem of the Western world, is the work of "a high poetic intelligence, written with a great skill and inspired subtlety of language and effective genius." But there is a touch which is mostly wanting, the touch of the absolute, the intensely inspired or revealing ...
... Numinous appears to a certain philosophic mood: An awful Silence watches tragic Time. 22 Or look at the Overhead verbal alchemisation for the state which in the language of the poetic intelligence Sri Aurobindo at one place in Savitri puts thus: My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer — 23 and which, with the same language lifted closer to that of rapturous seerhood ...
... believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." Sri Aurobindo has also pointed out that overhead poetry in small quantities had already been written in the past in various languages — and even the rare Overmind ...
... getting caught with an intense yet quiet immediacy is lost in what Sri Aurobindo would have called bright combinations and permutations playing about in the plane which he has termed "the poetic intelligence". Your "silent" has no surprise in it. One would mentally expect it. "Wordless" is rather feeble and lacks sufficient concreteness. Nothing except "voiceless" will convey an absolute and ultimate ...
... Page 200 through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." Sri Aurobindo has also pointed out that overhead poetry in small quantities had already been written in the past in various languages - and even the rare Overmind ...
... the general level, higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry." In the same letter we read: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening." Since the time of Nirodbaran's discovery other drafts of the same version have surfaced ...
... "Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else—but something of illumination and intuition also. 7. "it is a mixture. Something of the Illumined Mind, something of the Poetic Intelligence diluting the full sovereignty of the higher expression. 8. "Higher Mind combined with Illumined. 9. "Illumined Mind with something from Intuition. 10. "Illumined Mind with something ...
... speech has been cast in the mould of a clear Page 63 or high intellectuality rather than into the native utterance of imaginative vision adventuring beyond the normal bounds of a high poetic intelligence. We see in modern French creation a constant struggle with this limitation: even we find a poet like Mallarmé driven to break the mould of French speech in his desperate effort to force it to ...
... instance, always gives me that impression. In our own language I might say that it is an inspiration which tries to come from the higher mind but only succeeds in inflating the voice of the poetic intelligence. 1 November 1936 Early Twentieth-Century English Poetry About modern English poetry of the early part of this century Livingston Lowes, writing in 1918, remarks in his Convention and ...
... But the positive part of it helped me to develop towards a supra-intellectual style. As Love and Death was poetry of the vital, so Ahana [ Ahana and other Poems ] is mostly work of the poetic intelligence. Cousins' Page 229 criticism helped me to go a stage farther. 11 November 1936 Amal says Cousins ignored The Rishi while speaking of the others. Isn't that far worse? Neither ...
... plane—the vital? The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly coloured by it as in some others it comes through the poetic intelligence. What play or poem is this from? I don't remember it. It sounds almost overmental in origin. 19 February 1935 The phrase occurs in Sonnet CVII, beginning Not mine own fears, nor ...
... The poetry which arises from this mentality is full of a teeming many-sided poetic ideation which takes up the external and life motives not for their own sake, but to make them food for the poetic intelligence, blends the classical and romantic motives, adds to them the realistic, aesthetic, impressionist, idealistic Page 207 ways of seeing and thinking, makes many experiments and combinations ...
... Aurobindo's Comment "Very fine—language and rhythm remarkably harmonious, teres tot-usque rotundus 1 — the expression very felicitous and embodying exactly the thing seen. Source is poetic intelligence drawn back into inner mind and lifting towards the overhead planes from which it receives its vision and substance and a certain breath of subtlety and largeness." 1 "Smooth, complete ...
... original and expresses with great force the spiritual experience. A very fine poem—most of it being in substance from the Illumined Mind (except 2 or 3 lines) but its rhythm belongs to the poetic intelligence, strong and clear-cut but not with the subtle or large inner tones of the overhead music. It is a very luminous and powerful image." Page 86 ...
... the Numinous appears to a certain philosophic mood: An awful Silence watches tragic Time. Or look at the Overhead verbal alchemisation for the state which in the language of the poetic intelligence Sri Aurobindo at one place in Savitri puts thus: My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer— and which, with the same language lifted closer to that of rapturous seerhcod, he phrases ...
... "Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else—but something of illumination and intuition also. 7."It is a mixture. Something of the Illumined Mind, something of the Poetic Intelligence diluting the full sovereignty of the higher expression. 8."Higher Mind combined with Illumined. 9."Illumined Mind with something from Intuition. 10. "Illumined Mind with something ...
... believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." Mention of Overmind aligns Savitri to the top reach of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita, and the enormous mass of it, nearly 24,000 verses, renders it a super ...
... did not agree with it. But the positive part of it helped me to develop towards a supra-intellectual style. As "Love and Death" was poetry of the vital, so "Ahana" 49 is mostly work of the poetic intelligence. Cousins' criticism helped me to go a stage farther. D said to us once that he spoke to Mother about his hypersensitiveness, and she replied that an artist has to be that—he must have finer ...
... poetry—which is intellectual poetry—perhaps due to his father's influence, which I liked and miss in later poetry. He takes up an idea and puts it into poetical form. It is a poetry written from the poetic intelligence, as I say. The treatment is, as you say, his own technique which is a departure from old tradition. Tagore has brought in a new element of feeling and imagination and, as he is a genius, his ...
... sitting at a table for hours. And he would happily read out his creations to those who went to visit him …He was drawing inspiration from some deeper planes of consciousness than the ordinary poetic intelligence. Streams of poetry came flowing through his mind either in one language or the other.” [21] And he adds: “Nishikanto’s poesy also started being infused with spirituality—in its mood or feeling ...
... divinity getting caught with an intense yet quiet immediacy is lost in what Sri Aurobindo would have called bright combinations and permutations playing about in the plane which he has termed 'the poetic intelligence'. Your 'silent' has no surprise in it. One would mentally expect it. 'Wordless' is rather Page 9 feeble and lacks sufficient concreteness. Nothing except [Sri Aurobindo's] ' ...
... no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was Shakespeare's equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence but his style and movement nowhere came near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare... There is too a touch mostly ...
... aside and leave room for pure objective presentation, it puts on that too the stamp of its image. In the earlier epics the thought, religion, ethics, life movements are all strongly lived; the poetic intelligence is at work but always absorbed in its work, self-forgetful and identified with its object, and it is this that is the secret of their great creative force and living poetic sincerity and power ...
... that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Poetry and Art: Higher Mind and Poetic Intelligence Illumined Mind … greater Force is that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil ...
... Subconscient and the Inconscient × Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art: Higher Mind and Poetic Intelligence × Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine - II: The Ascent towards Supermind ...
... meaning behind Nature and terrestrial things. But in addition he possesses the intellectual equipment possible in his age and can speak with a subtle beauty and perfect melody the tongue of the poetic intelligence. He is a seer of spiritual realities, much more radiantly near to them than Wordsworth, has, what Coleridge had not, a poetic grasp of metaphysical truths, can see the forms and hear the voices ...
... Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was Shakespeare's equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence, but his style and movement nowhere come near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and, one might ...
... from the Illumined Mind, but as a rule it either comes from there with too much of the transcription diminished in its passage through the intellect or else is generated only in the creative poetic intelligence. But so many poets have written from that intelligence. If you could always write direct from the Illumined Mind—finding there not only the substance, as you often do, but the rhythm and language ...
... Classical work done since bears the stamp of the same origin: "most classical poetry," says Sri Aurobindo, 14 "is fundamentally poetry of the pure poetic intelligence." Broadly, Classicism is "the clear and straightforward expres-sion of thought with a just, harmonious and lucid turn". 15 It "insists on the presentation of life ...
... should be Pope. But his frequent rhetoric has a picturesque individual note which is at the same time a splash of the sea of the Life-force and a gust drawn from the high searching wind of the poetic intelligence peculiar to the modern Romanticism. In this individual note there is a tendency to pose and make a pageant of his heart, and it introduces a certain falsity and exaggeration into his work. Yet ...
... "The poetry which arises from this mentality is full of a teeming many-sided poetic ideation which takes up the external and life motives not for their own sake, but to make them food for the poetic intelligence, blends the classical and romantic motives, adds to them the realistic, aesthetic, impressionist, idealistic ways of seeing and thinking, makes many experiments and combinations, passes through ...
... substance, it is the strongly cut imaged idea in a religio-philosophical mood that is Miltonism—the substance which is proper, in one of its aspects, to what Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as the Poetic Intelligence from the really spiritual ranges that are "Overhead". Not that thought-form is absent in Savitri: there is plenty of it and that is why the poem is a philosophy no less than a legend ...
... when each style reaches its inevitable power." We may note here apropos of The Triumph of Dante that about Dante's own plane of poetry Sri Aurobindo has said: "Dante writes from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive drive behind it" — while about his style Sri Aurobindo has pronounced: "The 'forceful adequate' might apply to much of Dante's writing, but much also is sheer inevitable; ...
... whose arms enclasp infinitude.... Sri Aurobindo's Comment "Exceedingly fine. I have marked the best lines. It is a very powerful poetic expression of the idea. It is the poetic intelligence, of course, but the last lines 'the unknown White fire' etc. reach overhead." * Page 63 ...
... three lines are the Higher Mind rising into the Illumined and are very powerful. The rest is of the Higher Mind, except it may be the two before the last which are somewhat mixed with the poetic intelligence." Page 64 ...
... feeling which disregards the mind's positive view of things and its logical sequences; the centre or centres it knocks at are not Page 82 the brain-mind, not even the poetic intelligence but the subtle physical, the nervous, the vital or the psychic centre. The poem he quotes from Blake is certainly not nonsense, but it has no positive and exact meaning for the intellect or ...
... into a symbol of inner phenomena and into that operation a certain strain of mystic mind enters, but what is prominent is the intuitive inspiration throughout. It blends with the intuitive poetic intelligence in the first stanza, gets touched by the overhead intuition in the second, gets full of it in the third and again rises rapidly to that in the two last lines of the fourth stanza. This is ...
... Page 138 found both unavoidable - especially when I have tried to write with a word-vision and word-vibration drawn straight from what I have called inner planes without the normal poetic intelligence serving as paraphraser or interpreter. Sometimes an interpretative light may be present, but it is not the light of imaginative thought: it is something that appears like imaginative thought ...
... says that Harin's "poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind - other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, coloured and beautiful, - but surely not mystic..." The domains of spiritual speech or else of the deeper psychic utterance ...
... Numinous appears to a certain philosophic mood: An awful Silence watches tragic Time. [p. 444] Or look at the Overhead verbal alchemisation for the state which in the language of the poetic intelligence Sri Aurobin.do at one place in Savitri puts thus: My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer -[p. 408] and which, with the same language lifted closer to that of rapturous seerhood ...
... it is the strongly cut imaged idea in a religio-philosophical mood that is Miltonism - the substance which is proper, in one of its aspects, to what Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as the Poetic Intelligence from the really spiritual ranges that are "Overhead". Not that thought-form is absent in Savitri: there is plenty of it and that is why the poem is a philosophy no less than a legend ...
... through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to the highest or the Page 329 psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." Again, like the final version it not only strikes the identical opening chord - It was the hour before the Gods awake - [p.1] a semi-Vedic cosmic suggestion ...
... poets 33 writing 103,215 Overmind 51 inspiration 200 Intuition 323 P pain 75,82 parame vyoman 271 Phillips, Stephen 284 poet Creator 164 poetic intelligence 69,103,201,231, 330,341 poetry. See also inspiration creative genius 213 criteria for highest 205 function of inspired 343 giants of 205 imagery 46 overhead ...
... and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, — for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works. He does not stray into "the mystic cavern of the heart", does not follow the inner fire entering like a thief with the Cow of Light into the secrecy of secrecies. Shakespeare ...
... rise much above the human level, spend years of intense effort to enter into the world of the original sound where revelation and inspiration find their native expression. We may have ample poetic intelligence and creative insight, an unfailing aesthetic sense too, yet the vision and language and rhythm of the mantra may be quite elusive, may be lacking. A direct perception not only of the mysterious ...
... effects of rhythm that cannot fail to appeal to the inward ear. 173 In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo frequently races beyond what is perceivable through the senses, what is organisable by the merely poetic intelligence, and hence he is often obliged, in his attempts to express the inexpressible, to resort to the potent—if also sometimes confusing—language of symbols and images. Evelyn Underhill rightly observes ...
... ' 3 Whether Sri Aurobindo had any close acquaintance with the Cantos it is difficult to say; but he certainly knew about this unique 'work in progress' in a general way, and any major poetic intelligence and endeavour is bound to exert some kind of pull on other contemporary poetic powers and intelligences. A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared as early as 1933, though individual ...
... Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was Shakespeare's equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence, but his style and movement nowhere came near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and one might ...
... artistic creations. Almost all the ancient human cultures knew about them. We will take up the Overhead powers and give some idea of each in Sri Aurobindo's words : The Higher Mind: " The poetic intelligence is quite different; it is the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination akin to the intellect proper but lifted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane." "In the Higher ...
... the vision of Truth,— "Krānta Darśana". We will take up these overhead powers one by one and give Sri Aurobindo's description of their working. I. THE HIGHER MIND. "The poetic intelligence is quite different; it is the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination akin to the intellect proper but lifted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane, this is not."—Letters ...
... night" and "affable familiar ghost" who "gulls him with intelligence"? Usually, ironic praise has been read here; but Martin Seymour-Smith 12 insists on sincerity. Even about the "ghost"-line he 13 says that its mention of gulling "is not a criticism, but a poetic tribute of great depth" because all poetic knowledge, "intelligence", tricks the poet into appearing a dupe in the eyes of ...
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